


They Keep Killing Zoe

by feverbeats



Category: Luther (TV), Torchwood
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverbeats/pseuds/feverbeats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Is Suzie short for anything?" Tosh asks her once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Keep Killing Zoe

**Author's Note:**

> Ten steps between deaths. A crossover with an audience of about one.

1\. When Zoe first meets Jack Harkness, she is neither bleeding nor crying. She suspects this puts her in a different category than most people Jack meets. (She's dead, though. So there's that. She thinks he gets a lot of that.)

2\. "What's your name?" he asks when she opens her eyes in the van.

"Suzie," she answers. "Suzie Costello." It's the first time she's used her father's name since she married John.

3\. Jack won't tell her how she survived, but they both know she didn't pull through after that gunshot wound. Even after he gives her the Glove to experiment with, it doesn't entirely make sense. That's Jack, though, always pulling people back from the brink. (Until you realize that Jack never pulls people back so far that they won't fall if they're pushed.)

4\. "You've got a thing about it," Owen tells her. Owen Harper with his pinched face and accent that reminds her of--someone else. "About death, I mean."

Zoe--Suzie laughs. "No, not really. Not exactly. It's about getting away from it."

The first time she fucks Owen, she thinks of Ian Reed, whose obituary she stopped herself from cutting out of the paper.

5\. Tosh always smiles at her. It makes Suzie nervous, because Tosh is the kind of person who knows everything. She listens well and she's hooked in to the mainframe of the city, maybe the country. Hopefully she hasn't spent much time with English homicide reports.

"Is Suzie short for anything?" Tosh asks her once.

"No," Suzie answers.

6\. "You're running from something," Jack tells her seriously one night when it's just the two of them.

She gives him a pointed look. "Aren't we all? I don't mean that in an existential sense, I mean here. Torchwood. And I don't think you're in a position to be discussing flight instincts."

7\. Ianto reminds Suzie of John's partner.

He's always offering her tea, and it makes her smile, because she can let herself think he's uncomplicated. Ripley probably is. Ianto Jones is not.

He asks her, once, why she joined. She doesn't have an answer, nothing that explains why she didn't go back for Mark or her job or her _life_. But Jack offered her a new life (if she'd only known) and she had to take it. She'd always wanted more.

8\. Before she studied law, she studied engineering, and she likes those parts of her new job. The other parts, the nasty, quiet, sick parts are hard to ignore. They make her think of John, and the parts of his job they didn't talk about. (Jack isn't John, though. John was a good man.)

9\. Then there's the Knife and the deaths and the Glove. (She never wants to die again.)

10\. Zoe Luther, née Costello, gets a bullet through the head, from her own gun. (But that's not the end.)


End file.
